Dershowitz suggests U.S. on brink of 'surveillance state'

Constitutional scholar Alan Dershowitz made clear his opposition to the multiple probes that have pursued President Donald Trump, yet have failed to find evidence implicating the president for more than a year. On MSNBC, Dershowitz said, “I do not trust the government. I do not trust judges. I do not trust prosecutors when they are zealously seeking to go after a particular target, in this case Donald Trump.” He went on to say, “Nobody would have been going after Michael Cohen if he weren’t Donald Trump’s lawyer. That’s the reality.”

“People don’t investigate campaign contribution lapses or campaign rule violations generally about people who aren’t in the public life, and I just worry that when you have somebody with a target on his or her back – whether it is Hillary Clinton who could have been elected and had the same thing happen to her, or Donald Trump that civil libertarians ought to express concern,” said the former Harvard law professor.

“I don’t want to live in the surveillance state,” Dershowitz said, “I want to do everything in my power no matter who the target is to prevent this from occurring.”

“It was Lavrentiy Beria who told Stalin, ‘show me the man, and I’ll find your crime.’ You can go through the federal criminal code and find crimes that virtually any businessman, any politician has committed,” Dershowitz stated. “It is so easy to get a warrant. It is so easy to persuade a judge to give you a wiretap warrant. That simply doesn’t protect American citizens, and any civil libertarian who was exposed to what’s going on here today — if Hillary Clinton were the subject — would be taking exactly the opposite position.”

The sinister Beria was the head of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s feared secret police.

“There is so much hypocrisy, partisan hypocrisy out there. I don’t mind if conservatives take the view we ought to trust government or former prosecutors take the view we ought to trust government. My gripe is against civil libertarians and criminal defense lawyers who are always on the side of challenging the government, the ACLU, who have suddenly lost its way and forgotten what they’ve preached for 50 years because it is Donald Trump they’re after.”

"I think we are moving closer and closer to the surveillance state where phone calls are tapped, where emails are secured without a real basis," Dershowitz told MSNBC show host Steve Kornacki. "I think prosecutors should not be seeking wiretaps on lawyers' offices, and search warrants and subpoenas for lawyers' email files, unless they have very substantial evidence of very serious crimes," he said.